[The Typing Baker] Leave, You, to Reflect on Me

'Traveling Words' Park Rodrigo Sehee
Advice from a Traveler Returning After 10 Years

We always dream of traveling. Just the idea of escaping reality and going somewhere excites us. The origin of the word travel is travail, meaning hardship; after all, it is the suffering endured when leaving home. But once the journey ends and we return to a peaceful daily life, we find ourselves dreaming of travel again. Repeating this cycle, we face the question: what does travel mean to us? Many writings have attempted to answer, but there is no definitive answer. The response offered by traveling cinematographer Park Rodrigo and writer Sehee is “crossing and erasing all boundaries of the world.” Through their book Traveling Words, they wrote, “I want to erase not only the physical crossing of borders but also the boundaries between continents, the overlapping temporal boundaries within cities, the boundaries between work and travel, and finally, the invisible boundaries dividing life and travel.”

Traveling Words is a book the writer released ten years after I Want to Live Traveling Forever, published in 2013. For the author, who has worked in various genres and fields including film, documentary, media art, international peace movements, and Greenpeace activities, travel is a lifelong companion. When he said he wanted to live traveling forever, it meant living by filming with a perspective nurtured through exploring and studying various parts of the world. Traveling Words is a record of living out that wish over ten years. During this time, he captured what he saw and felt around the world through writing and photography. During the COVID-19 pandemic, when travel was impossible, he read travel books. In his words, travel and reading meet new knowledge and create new attitudes toward life; as travel continues, the traveler’s reflections deepen. He has come to cautiously advise young people who are struggling to “go travel.” Travel will comfort and encourage them.

That alone would be meaningful enough, but what the author gained through travel goes beyond comfort and courage. By physically experiencing diverse cultures at travel destinations, he reflects on our society. As a result of his contemplation, he wrote that Korea is a society lacking in “tolerance” and “leisure.” Even without the author’s critique, we know this because we live that way ourselves: a lack of tolerance that embraces others without exclusion and a lack of leisure to fully enjoy life. The author’s question, “Is it really desirable to sacrifice present leisure for future leisure?” awakens us to this reality.

To find tolerance and leisure, we must erase the boundary between travel and daily life again, the author concludes. He wrote that travel must become a sustainable way of life, not just an event. Because travel can become an everyday experience encountered anywhere, he filled this book with words such as pets, terraces, windows, lovers, coffee, SNS, pilgrimages, soul food, and mother tongue. Over more than ten years of traveling between Europe and North America, he carefully gathered what he saw, felt, and thought into twenty-eight words that everyone knows and uses. He also captured scenes that these ordinary words embody at travel destinations through photographs.

Although Lee Sang-eun sang that “life is travel,” it is not an easy thing. One must be able to enjoy the pleasures of travel in daily life and spend ordinary days even while traveling. Perhaps this is the state of a sage. But the way to start is simple. The author said, “Work a little less, earn a little less, but do your best to travel longer and more often.” If you have habitually said you cannot travel because you lack leisure, now is the time to pack your travel bag to find that leisure.

(Traveling Words / Park Rodrigo, Sehee / Gotgan / 19,500 KRW)

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.